Miniature schnauzer pet portraits

Meet the very cute Dolly and Frankie, two adorable miniature schnauzers I have had the pleasure of painting. I enjoyed every minute of this pastel dog portrait due to the fluffiness of the subjects!

About Dolly and Frankie

As ever I like to add a little about the subjects where possible, and their human Dad has passed on the following info:

Frankie is nearly 6 yrs old and a bit of a wuss. His ears are his main feature as it is unusual that they stick up all the time, but that makes him more special. He is so placid and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Dolly is 6 months old and was bought as company for Frankie, but as with all females she has taken over and loves bossing him about. She is starting to calm down a bit now and her personality is starting to show.

Oh dear, sounds like poor Frankie is under the thumb already! Us women do like to boss men about whenever possible, I can’t argue with that! Sounds as though these two are adored by their owners doesn’t it!

Miniature schnauzer pet portraits creation

This one is a 12 x 16 inch pastel portrait. As usual I used pastelmat, this time the anthracite colour. The background was created with panpastels in a few shades to make a soft tonal background which blended together smoothly when I used the sofft sponges and tools. I kept the shades of the background quite light as these two little dogs are reasonably dark in colours.

So meet the lovely Dolly. isn’t she cute! As I am so busy (it is Christmas, note to any pet owners, ‘dog portraits are not just for Christmas’) I used lots of sticks to put the base layers down on Dolly. I used the darkest grey to map out the darker areas first then layered a light touch of it elsewhere to create the shadows between the individual hairs of the fur. I treated myself to a full set of sennelier pastel sticks and after looking at them for a few days I got stuck in with using them! They are so buttery and smooth to use, I am hooked! I also used some grey sticks from the derwent range too to give a variation in the underlayers. I then used sharp pastel pencils to add the finer details, building up layers as I went and using the lightest touch to add the highlights of the fur.

I used the same technique, blocking areas in with sticks, then sharp pastel pencils for details on top, all over this portrait which made things go a lot quicker. Here you can see me using derwent pastel pencils. These are lovely and soft which can really make the highlights pop if used with a light touch.

You can see how long some of Dolly’s fur is in some places, this fur (not all fur is equal!) was simply created by using longer strokes of pastel pencils for the highlights. A very simple technique which anyone can use.

Here I’ve started work on Dolly’s paler chest fur. Again, even though this fur is lighter in shade, I still used a vary dark stick underneath to provide shadows between the pale fur.

Here you can see Dolly/s marvellous whiskers and lighter fur on her face. This was my favourite part of her portrait, I think it looks so cute!

I had a bit of a spurt at this point, Dolly was completed other than tidying up so work started on Frankie. Frankie’s chest fur is a little longer than Dolly’s and so I simply used longer strokes of pastel to recreate this.

Frankie is well underway here. Frankie’s chest skin showed through so pink shades were added to represent this. Once blended together, the chest area looked very realistic and I was pretty pleased with it.

So here are Dolly and Frankie, the miniature schnauzers. They are the two cutest dogs I’ve painted in a long time on the easel. I really loved these two as subjects and hope I get to meet them in the flesh as they are pretty local to me. Hoping their portrait will be collected!